Telematics units within mobile vehicles provide subscribers with connectivity to a telematics service provider (TSP). The TSP provides subscribers with an array of services ranging from emergency call handling and stolen vehicle recovery to diagnostics monitoring, global navigation system aided position identification, map services, and turn-by-turn navigation assistance. Telematics units are often provisioned and activated at a point of sale when a subscriber purchases a telematics-equipped vehicle. Once provisioned and activated, telematics units can be utilized by a subscriber to obtain telematics services, such as those described herein, from the TSP.
In order to receive customized telematics services, individual subscribers may input a variety of personalized data into a telematics unit or an associated control module of a vehicle. For example, individual subscribers may store a set of favorite radio stations at a particular geographic location, a phone number corresponding to a mobile phone, preferred climate control settings, a code used to open a garage door at a particular address, and various other information that enables the telematics unit or other control module of the vehicle to customize the services provided to a user of the vehicle. Once the personalized data is entered into the telematics unit or other control module by the user, the personalized data may be stored in a local memory of the telematics unit or the other control module. In addition to the local storage of personalized data at the telematics unit or the other control module, the TSP may store a variety of user-specific data corresponding to each subscriber at a centralized remote database, e.g. a database at an operations control center (OCC).
With the increasing popularity of vehicle sharing communities (e.g. Zipcar), the probability that a subscriber to telematics services provided by a TSP may use more than one vehicle has increased. Furthermore, the probability that an individual vehicle may be used by more than person has also increased. In such circumstances, the telematics unit of the vehicle may attempt to provide services to a user of a vehicle that are customized according to personalized data of a different user of the vehicle. Therefore, the services provided to the current user would not be optimized for that current user but instead for a previous user. Moreover, the current user of the vehicle may be able to access personalized data stored at the telematics unit by a previous user of the vehicle.